Sayurbox Engineering Going 100% Remote

Sayurbox has allowed remote work for over two years (even before pandemic hits), but we never announced it publicly. I wrote the following memo to formally announce that we’re going 100% remote onward, so people don’t have to worry about returning to the office. In this memo, I explained the reason behind the decision and the few tradeoffs we considered that we want our team to be aware of.

From: gogo@
To: engineers@, leads@
Date: 2021–12–21 3 pm WIB
Subject: Sayurbox Engineering Going 100% Remote

In March 2020, we announced a policy for everyone to work from home to avoid the spread of COVID-19. We adjusted our working style, process, and environment to fit this new normal. It’s been almost two years ever since. I want to formally announce that Sayurbox Tech and Data team will be 100% remote with this email.

⏱️ Why now

Why decide to go 100% remote now?

In 2020 our engineering team was around 20 people strong. In 2021, we’ve grown the team to 100 people and counting. With all the initiatives we plan to do in 2022, we plan to expand our engineering team to 250+ by 2022. This means not only do we need to be more deliberate in building our culture, but we also need to expand our talent search and make Sayurbox an attractive place to build a career. This involves removing the limit of geographical barrier from our hiring — which translates to remote working. It’s also not a surprise that people are enjoying the flexibility to work from anywhere, which will further help attract more talent who love the flexibility of remote working.

The second reason is that COVID is not going anywhere. We’re on the cusp of the worldwide 4th wave, and possibly it will be as normal as seasonal flu. This means avoiding crowded places to protect ourselves and those we care about the most. This also means work from home is here to stay and will continue to become the norm.

The last reason is that we’ve been doing this for two years already. We’ve worked in geographical diversity, ranging from Gurgaon, Delhi, Medan, Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Malang, and Bali. But people outside of the company were never aware of this. So this memo is the last straw to publicly announce that the Sayurbox Engineering team can work from anywhere.

🔄 Tradeoffs

100% remote work means we are sacrificing a lot of benefit of working in the office. This is something that we’ve contemplated for a while. Remote work will inevitably dictate the culture we’re building in the future.

✈️ Flexibility vs. Connection

The most obvious benefit of remote work is time and location flexibility.

This means being closer to your family and loved ones.

This means not waking up at 6 am and spending 2 hours in traffic for a one-way commute.

This means working by the beach, sipping coconut water during the winter months.

Our fellow team member Pezet is one of few who took this benefit to its potential. He escaped the hustle and bustle of Jakarta and traveled for two months in Lombok and Bali (Shivam and I even met him in Bali). He accomplished this feat while still leading the engineering effort to ship one of our most essential products, Sayurkilat.

But this also means sacrificing human-to-human connection.

You won’t have that spontaneous “let’s go to the warehouse today” or “I am bored, let’s go to the mall!” moment.

You won’t have that coffee break discussion where all great ideas are brewed together with the coffee.

You won’t have that heartfelt private 1-on-1 session with your teammate where you can see eye to eye and feel each others’ emotions across the room.

There’s no office gossiping (yes, I consider the lack of office gossip a negative point 😛).

We’ll work on several initiatives to help with this. At the very least, we want everyone to feel heard and have someone to talk to.

⚙️ Asynchronous vs. Synchronous Work

In his article, Pedro, Brex co-founder, wrote:

We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us

We’re so used to working face-to-face. We built our tools around working face-to-face. And thereafter, our tools shape how we work. We’re used to drawing ideas on the whiteboard. We’re used to poking our teammates to ask questions. We’re accustomed to exchanging ideas verbally and synchronously.

But this won’t work in remote work. Whiteboard is not as easy to use. Poking teammates won’t always work. And talking verbally is tiring in a remote setting (though, to be fair, it’s exhausting for me in a non-remote setting as well ☠️). And we’re not the only ones. There’s enough research that says synchronous video conferences will tire you out quickly.

We need to adjust how we operate to survive remote work in the long run. The world is still figuring out how this will work at scale. We have several companies as our compass as they’ve done this before successfully for several years already. The common theme between these companies is the emphasis on asynchronous work.

Asynchronous (async) work happens when people on the same team work during different times of the day. It is contrasted with traditional working models where everyone is expected to be available around the same time window, e.g., 9–5.

The main difference between the two and a core characteristic of asynchronous work is asynchronous communication. Instead of expecting all people to instantly reply and participate in any work discussion, they’re allowed to respond at their earliest convenience.

Asynchronous work generates a new problem: how do we make sure alignments still happen? Where do we draw the line between synchronous and asynchronous discussion? Here are a few attempts we’ve practiced that works:

1. Writing Product Requirement Document and Engineering Requirement Document.
2. Write down our shared goal across the organization in the form of OKR once per quarter, and make sure each of the key results and commitments aligns between the dependencies. For example, product and tech teams have the same OKR for moving the conversion rate by 17%. And they commit to building 12 products by the end of Q1 2022.
3. Document all tasks in JIRA, diligently clean them up as needed, and make sure they’re the source of truth of what the teams are currently executing at any given time.
4. Build continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline and policy that allow every engineer to deploy directly to production.

Though we probably can’t remove synchronous communication altogether (and it’s not our goal to do so). Not only there are few instances where synchronous communication is still more efficient and effective compared to a written one, but we are also social creatures who need human interactions. I believe 1-on-1 sessions would still be better done verbally and synchronously for the foreseeable future 🙂.

To show how serious we are in enforcing asynchronous work, we’re declaring no meeting Wednesday and Friday for all engineering teams. This means more time for deep work, like coding, data analysis, or strategizing. Or you can choose to relax and take an early weekend if you decide to do so (as long as you still deliver)!

🌴 Big Irregular Offsite + WFH Tools vs. Regular Team Bonding Activities

Working from home means we’re not going to be in the office nor spend as much time with our co-workers. The implication for this is we probably won’t go offsite as often as we used to. And you probably won’t eat out as much with your team because your team member might not even be on the same island you’re in.

But this doesn’t mean we’ll keep the money to ourselves. This means we will have a budget for a grander, bigger, and more fun offsite. This opens up an avenue to a more memorable, intentional outing experience. This will probably become an exciting PR stunt as well 😛

This can feel lonely for most of the year, though. But this will allow us to allocate budget for a better WFH setup (like a new monitor or headset).

Surprisingly by not incentivizing gather-up events, you might build more genuine connections. When you meet, it’s because you’re genuinely interested in each other. And this connection will go beyond our tenure in Sayurbox.

✅ What Should We Expect

So what does this entails? How does making intentional remote work change how our team works. Here’re few deliberate changes we’re making in the engineering team:

There will be no local office even if COVID dies down. The only primary office we’ll have is Pejaten, Jakarta. There will be no Gurgaon, Delhi, Yogya, or Surabaya office (though the Bali office is not out of the equation yet 😛).

No meeting Wednesday and Friday for engineers for focus time. You might still get interview invites. As a tech lead, you might still get several meeting invites.

New team members from across the world, with ± 2 hours timezone from WIB.

More intentional 1-on-1s. If not already happening, managers will set up weekly 1:1 with their direct report. In fact, 1-on-1 will be managers’ 1st priority. Consider https://marcorogers.com/blog/my-approach-to-1-on-1s to help guide your 1-on-1. Feel free to set up 1-on-1 syncs with your fellow team members and cross-functional partner to build connectionsI’veve personally been doing this with the C-levels and other XFN partners.

The principle: Happy engineer → good system → good product → happy customer → increase revenue → more successful company → happy engineer.

There will be more expectation and rigor toward process and tooling. We expect our team to write Engineering Requirement Document or ERD (PRD but for technical stuff). We’ll invest more in tooling to help with remote work (Notion, Excalidraw+). We’ll invest in stability automation like monitoring, alerting, and self-healing test automation. Also, we’ll invest more tooling and documentation related to onboarding new team members.

(Under discussion) a shift of stipend from team bonding to WFH amenities (work equipment, internet).

🧘 Closing Thoughts

In my short career, I’ve learned that the costliest decision is usually indecisiveness. We were indecisive about whether we would come back to the office eventually or were we going to be 100% remote. We end up not getting both (we can’t go to the office and expand our team to hire full-remote positions).

We’ve done this for the last two years, so this change is not that drastic. And I believe the coming years will get better because we will be intentional about this.

This will also be an iterative process. We’ll make mistakes. We’ll lose people. We’ll argue. But we’re going to get better every day. And we’re going to make this a worthwhile experience for everyone involved.

📚 Further Reading

The following list contains further reading if you’re interested in some companies that are already further down the line on their journey as remote-first companies. One of these companies even took it to the extreme: they don’t even have a single full-time employee.

1. Gumroad
2. GitLab
3. Brex. Similar interesting read from Brex.